Alpaca Blog

Well, yesterday I had my gross operation for the ganglion cyst in my wrist. Typing left-handed is not fun! but I had to brag about Cassy‘s new female cria born around 12 noon today. 20 lbs. female and all black with 1 tiny white spot behind the left front foot. What a beauty!

Mom & Baby doing fine. Cria nursed within 1 hour and got lots of milk. My hand hurts from filming when I shouldn’t have been but I’m so excited! A new little life on this Earth. We are so lucky to be part of it and witness it. Good news for Nickleby too. He’s now produced 2 girls, a gray & a black. This ought to help him find a buyer!

These little miracles make it all worthwhile.… Read more

Well my boy Valentino has a new cria ( alpaca baby ) on the ground as of about 9:30 this morning – Go Valentino – you are the man! The dam, Sable, belongs to my friend Helen from Red Barn Alpacas in Sykesville and she was kind enough to send me a photo right away. I HATE it when people buy alpacas or breedings and turn out not to be the type who can figure out how to e-mail a photo of the new baby! so Thank God Helen is not one of those because I do need photos of all of my “grandchildren” as soon as possible.

Sable, was a little bratty during the breeding last year and decided that she was going to go down for Valentino then breed for 10 minutes or so and then just went, “oops I did it again” and decided she didn’t want to finish breeding after all, she then jumped up and said Hey, Let’s just be friends.” Val went bonkers and I was trying to boot him out of her pen but he wasn’t budging so I tried to let Sable out instead. She wouldn’t leave either! Meanwhile, another male, Campion, got in and then, while both guys were in there, Little Ms. Sable decided, “Hey, maybe I DO want to be bred after all.” or maybe she’s just into weird stuff but, she cushed back down instead of leaving the pen and acted ready to breed again.

Campion tried to jump right on her and HE WASN’T THE ONE WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE THE JOB!!!!… Read more

At least I think this is the first post in this blog. This blog was originally posted on my old, old website. The blog is circa 2006, but the website was much older. I have moved the entire thing to a new website host and taken this blog out of blogging format and turned it into a series of webpages. I tried to remove or replace all of the old blogging-style codes but some weird characters may show up now and then. For that I apologize. My knowlege of global search and replace with escape characters and complicated wildcard characters in Dreamweaver is not expert level. Click on the brown alpaca image at bottom to go to the next post.

So the Festival was, as always, thrilling, wonderful, exciting but also exhausting and a little stressful. Sold lot’s of sweaters and yarn and stuff, took a great class by Ann Feitelson in Fair Isle Knitting and, for once, was NOT the dumbest one in the class. My snowflake pattern actually appeared AND I cut my Steek and did a 3 needle bind off which actually worked! Huh! The usual suspects were in the class with me, my friends, Roseann, (teaches knitting at Springwater Fiber in VA), Toni Minkel (teaches knitting in Mount Airy), Paula & Susan from West Virginia and also Kathy from Needles Hooks and Books in Mount Airy.

Junior Hand Spinner’s contest was great. We had some amazing little spinners – see photo

– and Tom (the Cuban ball and chain) did the Friday Night Vendor dinner along with his own personal “Mini Me” our son Nick.… Read more